Design and devotion: Surges of rational and normative ideologies of control in managerial discourse.

Introduction1 I have argued elsewhere that administrative ethics as a significant field of study is only about 30 years old, dating from the mid-1970s, largely instigated by the work of the New Public Administration, and reflecting developments in thought about public administration dating back into the 1930s. During these few decades, scholarly work on administrative ethics and its application to practice have expanded with enormous speed and rich diversity, both in the United States and around the world. The number of journal articles, books, courses, conferences, and training exercises have proliferated beyond anyone’s wildest expectations. More than a passing fad, administrative ethics has demonstrated its sustainability and its centrality to the field (Cooper 2001, 1–36). What is lacking with respect to these developments is anything like a focused effort by groups of scholars to study specific sets of significant research questions in a sustained and systematic fashion. There is an enormous amount of interesting but highly disparate scholarship on administrative ethics reflecting the diverse and often episodic interests that capture our attention. The existence of this rich diversity of work is not bad at all; rather, it indicates lively intellectual engagement and the multifaceted nature of the field. It also may be viewed as a necessary scoping of the field in its early stages, the product of an energetic exploration of the range of concerns in the study of administrative ethics. After approximately three decades, however, there is very little that manifests ongoing scholarship by working groups based on specific theoretical perspectives, sets of related problems, or significant issues. Without collaborative efforts to fix our gaze on the most fundamental and vexing questions that are essential to moving administrative ethics forward, there is a risk that the creativity and energy now being directed to the subject will dissipate, and that our field will fail to earn the sustained prominence in journals, curricula, and professional development it deserves. Without this kind of concentrated work, administrative ethics may remain an interesting but peripheral concern. None of us can define the elements and boundaries of such concentrated efforts; that needs to become a matter in which many of us invest ourselves. We need to work at building consensus among those interested in administrative ethics about sets of research questions that, in some sense, define the heart of the field. Not intended to preclude or exclude other work on other questions, the call here is for the establishment of a center of gravity for the development of administrative ethics around some focused collaborative efforts. Diversity of interests articulated by many from various areas in public administration are needed to keep the field fresh and lively; focused efforts of those mainly committed to studying administrative ethics may be required to provide sustainability, coherence, and sufficient weight to advance it solidly into the core of public administration. This essay should be viewed as the first bid in a conversation about those “big questions” around which some focused, sustained, and collaborative activity might be organized. It began with an invitation I sent out to the ASPA Section on Ethics Listserv on September 27, 2002. In that message, members of the section were asked to offer their nominations for the “big questions” in administrative ethics. Thoughtful responses were received from 10 persons, with excellent proposals for questions of central impor-

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Big Questions in Administrative Ethics: A Need for Focused, Collaborative Effort

Although the new middle classes in emerging markets are a matter of significant interest for marketing scholars and managers, there has been little systematic research on their values and preoccupations. This article focuses on new middle class consumers to identify the new, shared socio-ideological sensibilities informed by the recent neoliberal reforms in emerging markets and examines how these sensibilities are actualized in consumption. Through an ethnographic study of fashion consumption in Turkey, the authors explicate three salient new middle class sensibilities, which implicate the mastery of the ordinary in pursuit of connections with people, institutions, and contexts. These sensibilities crystallize into a particular mode of consumption—“formulaic creativity”—which addresses consumers' desire to align with the middle and helps them reconcile the disjuncture between the promises of neoliberalism and the realities of living in unstable societies. The article provides recommendations on product po...

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Competently Ordinary: New Middle Class Consumers in the Emerging Markets

During the late 1950s, the United States Air Force initiated development on nearly twodozen military “command and control systems.” What they shared in common was a novel application of digital electronics to the problem of nuclear warfare. Most of these systems descended, in some fashion, from a program called “SAGE,” the Semiautomatic Ground Environment, which gathered data from a network of radar stations for processing at large Air Defense Direction Centers, where digital computers assisted human operators in tracking, identifying, and, potentially, intercepting and destroying hostile aircraft. Although histories of SAGE have been written before, they have tended to stress digital computing as a rationalist response to the threat of mass raids by nuclear-armed Soviet bombers. Nevertheless, organizational sociology suggests that large bureaucratic organizations, such as the United States Air Force, often defy our intuition that decisions, technological or otherwise, must follow a perceived problem to its potential solution. According to the so-called “garbage-can model of organizational choice,” problems and solutions may, in certain circumstances, arise independently and join together unpredictably, because the basic social phenomena do not conform to bureaucratic ideals. This dissertation argues that SAGE, and indeed, the entire ColdWar project of nuclearand-command, can be understood as a sequence of “garbage-can-like” decisions, resulting in a conglomeration of independent systems whose behavior appeared reasonable from the perspective of the using organization, but which nonetheless failed to cohere against the far greater danger of a global thermonuclear exchange. They did, however, succeed at satisfying the government’s need to act by projecting uncomfortable questions of political organization onto popular technology programs.

The Computer in the Garbage Can: Air-Defense Systems in the Organization of US Nuclear Command and Control, 1940-1960

Historically, the metaphor of the iron cage, as a key component of Weber’s sociological imagination, has played a central role in organization studies. It did so both in its initial role in the sociology of bureaucracy and in its reinterpretation in institutional terms. More recently, there have been claims that the metaphors should change. The implications of this for the analysis of organization are the subject of this paper. To address these changes, we draw on debates that have been current in the sociology of consumption, where there is an emergent consensus that there has been a shift to an increasingly liquid modernity. We ask, what are the implications of liquid modernity when viewed not solely in the sphere of consumption but when we shift focus back to the sphere of production — to organizations?

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William H. Whyte join(

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